SAP BW/BI stands for Business Information Warehouse, also known as business intelligence. For any business, data reporting, analyses and interpretation of business data is very crucial for running business smoothly and making decision. SAP BW/BI manage the data and enables to react quickly and in line with the market. It enables the user to analyse data from operative SAP applications as well as from other business.

Data flows from a transactional system to the analytical system (BW). DS (Data Service) on the transactional system needs to be replicated on BW side and attached to info source and update rules respectively.

‘Operational Data Store’ or ‘ODS’ is used for detailed storage of data. It is a BW architectural component that appears between PSA (Persistent Staging Area) and infocubes, it allows BEX (Business Explorer) reporting. It is primarily used for detail reporting rather than dimensional analysis, and it is not based on the star schema. ODS (Operational Data Store) objects do not aggregate data as infocubes do. To load the data into an IDS object, new records are inserted, existing records are updated, or old records are deleted as specified by RECORDMODE value.

‘Infocube’ is structured as the star schema and it is a data storage area. To create an infocube, you require 1 ‘fact table’ surrounded by 4 dimensions. The ‘fact table’ is surrounded by different dim table, which are linked with DIM’ ids. And as per the data, you will have aggregated data in the cubes.

A dimension in BW is a collection of reference information about a measurable event in data warehousing. In this context, events are known as “facts”. For example, a customer dimension’s attributes could include first and last name, gender, birth date etc. To optimize the dimensions, do not add most dynamic characteristics into the same dimension and make the dimension smaller. Also, define as many dimensions as possible, and the dimension should not exceed 20% of the fact table size.

Star Schema comprises of Fact tables and Dimension Tables, while the table that consists the Master data are kept in separate tables. These separate tables for Master data are referred as Extended Star Schema.

The use of the process chain is to automate the data load process. It automates the process like Data load, Indices creation, Deletion, Cube compression etc. Process chains are only to load your data’s.

You can convert package group into a process chain by double clicking on the info package group, then you have to click on the ‘Process Chain Maint’ button where you have to type the name and description, this will insert individual info packages automatically.

In the ‘start routine’, you can modify the data packages, when data is loading. While conversion of routine, usually refers to routines bound to info objects for conversion of internal and display format.

Homogeneous Multiproviders: It consists of technically identical info-providers, such as infocubes with exactly the same characteristics and key figures.

Heterogeneous Multiproviders: These info-providers only have a certain number of characteristics and key figures. It can be used for the modelling of scenarios by dividing them into sub-scenarios. Each sub-scenario is represented by its own info-provider.

The sets of cubes delivered by SAP are used to measure performance for query, loading data etc. B/W statistics as the name suggests is useful in showing data about the costs associated with the B/W queries, OLAP, aggregative data etc. It is useful to measure the performance of how quickly the queries are calculated or how quickly the data is loaded into BW.

To define data aggregation hierarchy can be used. It is a logical structure that use ordered levels as a means of organizing data. For instance, by using time dimension hierarchy, it is possible to aggregate data from the month level to the quarter level to the year level.